Posts tagged astronomy

It's easy for Hubble to take pictures of Jupiter or its moons, but it only gets the chance to capture the planet on cam with three visible Galilean satellites once or twice a decade. That's what makes the photo above special: it's a picture of the gas giant with three of its largest moons (and the...

Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.
A Look Back at the Doomed Virtual Reality Boom of the 90s
Kyle Fowle, Kill...

Guess what, story fans? Skyforge has lore!
Today's dev post explains the myth behind the Celestial Fortress, an epic construction project floating in the sky meant to safeguard the planet Aelion from its own inward-spiraling moon. "While historians still argue about its true origin and meaning," i...

The device regarded the world's first computer (analog, of course) could have been used even earlier than researchers thought. Inspection of a dial from the 2,000-year-old Antikythera Mechanism and an examination of Babylonian eclipse records revealed the device's origin to be 205 BC, 50-100 years...

Taking pictures of stars and deep sky objects with an iPhone would not have been something I thought would have worked, but as Apple hardware improves with better low light camera performance, apps are there to exploit it and push the envelope.
Several users of NightCap Pro, an app designed for nig...

Earlier this year, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica were thought to have found evidence of gravitational waves produced during the first moments of the big bang. The discovery was heralded as one of the most important discoveries...

Star Walk Kids is a version of the astronomy apps Star Walk and Star Walk 2 - the latter of which TUAW's own Mel Martin called "impressively good looking" - designed specifically for educating kids about the wonders of the stars and the universe. It features use of the iPhone and iPad's built-in g...

Star Walk 2 (US$2.99 with in-app purchases) is a solid update from the original award winning Star Walk astronomy program. This new version has a re-designed interface with the look and feel of each element beautifully crafted and drawing you into the inner workings of the app.
One of the horizon...

We are in the middle of the Perseids meteor shower over the next couple of days. This particular shower is made up of cosmic debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. The peak nights should be tonight and tomorrow (August 11-12, 2014) , although there are always variables that can cause earlier or later pea...

Outdoor photographers are going to love PhotoPills. This US$9.99 app is a treasure trove of information for photographers who do most of their work outside.
The app allows you to plan your photography for any location on earth by letting you know where the sun and moon will be, provides depth of fi...

It's a catch-22: the lenses of ground-based telescopes can be made huge, but are hamstrung by distortion from the atmosphere. Hubble-type telescopes don't have that issue, but must be small to be launched into space, and good luck fixing them. That's where NASA's SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory f...

Thanks to a wobble in its host star, researchers from UNSW have spotted a planet only 16 light-years away that could harbor life (shown in an artist's conception, above). However, being there would bear little resemblance to living on Earth. It's at least five times as massive, for starters, and i...